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Gentlemen I had the best of both worlds! Everything is controlled via C4, all programing logic is there, am not convinced with anything else, I also have a decent dealer.
The DIY side resides in two parts, continuously upgrading non C4 components; network/cams/speakers/Streamers, etc, things that are easily done via ComposerHE, the other side is tapping into MQTT world and integrating a lot of these devices to C4, this part after getting the driver is maintained by me, once you are settled there is little to be done, but overall no one tinkers forever!

As an advanced end-user with C4, Home Assistant, Hubitat, Apple HomeKit, and Alexa here are some of my general observations:
Different people have different use cases, and dealers should be able to be responsive to each. These systems need to be broken down between control and automation capabilities. They all will do some of each, but not to the same levels. Further, there is a large difference between AV and non-AV use cases. Maybe security too. Finally, device markets continue to make significant changes. Consumer level stuff is becoming more capable, making some of the higher-end stuff like distributed video and audio even more niche. The Thread/Matter devices coming out will keep that trend going for a while. C4 dealers should understand the capabilities of the consumer/DIY stuff even if they never want to deal with it. Here are some more specific observations/opinions
My use case: I use C4 to control AV, lights, HVAC. I use Hubitat for most automation of non-AV components especially lights. I use Home Assistant to bring a couple cloud integrations into my system. I use Apple Home for device control. I push devices to Apple Home via Homebridge. Alexa is linked to both C4 and Hubitat. C4 is great for controlling AV stuff. That's how I came to use it. C4 is OK for controlling other things. I'm an Apple user and while the C4 phone/pad app has certainly become more responsive, it's still not what I would call great. As said in another reply in this thread, one nice thing is the consistent interface. Dashboards are one of those things that people have strong feelings about. Within dashboards there are 2 use cases too, 1) display of information, and 2) device control. They are of minimal use to me, so I would never buy a T4 or any other touch screen just for HA purposes. Home Assistant is extremely flexible and powerful. C4 is OK, and Hubitat is not very good without an extreme amount of effort. As stated before, Apple Home is good and easy to implement for non-AV control. From an automation perspective C4, Hubitat, and Home Assistant are all capable and reliable. All have UI issues that mostly become no more than annoyances with use. C4's are a mid '90s Novell Netware like interface with some inconsistencies in how automations are categorized/accessed. And the requirement to use a Windows app. Hubitat's UI is a bit clickety. Home Assistant has a big curve due to its fairly quickly changing design and a mix of YAML, integrations, devices, entities, blueprints, etc. All 3 have apps that will streamline automations. My biggest use case is for sensor-based lighting and I find Hubitat to be the best as it has a couple built-in apps that cover use cases from simple to complex. All done via a web UI.  One of C4's big selling points is support. Can't be undersold for many customers. The others rely on user forums. Hubitat has a very good user forum where questions get answered, even by company owners. Home Assistant has a big forum with very uneven quality. For example, RadioRA 2 issues get few to no answers and the integration is still old-style. One of Hubitat's owners uses RadioRA 2 and any issues are quickly addressed.  All have fairly good device integration capabilities. As said, C4 is superior for AV devices. C4 gets limited by its Zigbee Pro implementation. I came to C4 via an existing implementation in my newer house. I have a collection of about 50 Zigbee sensors that I am not willing to change out. On the AV side the Apple Music, Spotify, and Sonos C4 integrations are non-existent or lacking (I realize that may not be solely due to C4). The nice thing about the DIY controllers, especially Home Assistant, is that there is almost always someone who comes up with automation capabilities for new devices. One downside is that sometimes those integrations are a reverse engineered implementation like MyQ, Lutron Caséta, or August that are subject to undocumented API changes. I dislike the dealer model. Dealers add value for many customers. I'd like the market to be more like plumbers. One can hire a plumber to change a toilet flap or one can do all the work to re-plumb their renovation. The plumbers don't care if you solder your joints and the plumbing supply companies are happy to sell you whatever you need. I'm happy to pay for 4Sight and would pay more for complete system access. To address a couple specific points in this thread, a) I use the C4 native Apple TV IP driver on one of my Apple TVs. I don't use it a lot, but I have not noticed any recent issues. And b) presence can be a tricky issue no matter what system one uses. One way to make presence more reliable is to aggregate sensors. Apple Home, Alexa, Ubiquiti routers all have triggers and messages that can be used for presence. Another phone app that may help is Geofency. Aggregate them to get better reliability. Presence is hard to automate because there are so many potential exceptions, like having workers in your house when you leave. Overall I'm happy with my setup even though I need more than one controller to make it all work. I do think there will be lots of evolution in the next few years that will open up new competitive opportunities for C4 and other companies.

Interesting thoughts.  I admit my bias, I genuinely love C4.
On your comments, I have read lots and lots of posts complaining about the Apple TV IP integration.  I have 7 or 8 Apple TV’s across 2 residences and they have all worked flawlessly since the day that the Apple Bridge driver was released.  There was one exception when an update required a reboot of the Director (both residences).  I agree that this sort of thing should just work and I know many folks have not had my experience. But my experience has been that this just works. Kudos to my dealer for getting this right.
On panelised lighting… I have wall acne (C4 wall acne) at my main residence and am very pleased that I went with panelised lighting at my Beach House.  This also just works.  That said,  my maintenance people managed to close and open all of the wrong valves on my pool last week and in the chaos (including losing half of my pool water - around 50,000 litres lost) they managed to get water all over one of my panelised lighting boards (14 modules so over 100 circuits).  This will be a costly repair but not a C4 fault.  I am very glad that my dealer recommended having at least one load in every room controlled directly by a keypad dimmer or I would have been in the dark this weekend! 
 
My understanding is that other major automation system have an equivalent setup to C4 panelised lighting so if one was of a mind to do so, one could still dump the C4 equipment and move to something else?

I must say… I do both… want reliability and tinker constantly.  Fortunately I have a phenomenal dealer…

I went the full extreme, deployed an EA1/CA1 @ my summer house, just to get rid of all these remotes in Family/Master Rooms, I have 3 TV's only, added a Soundbar with a built in FTV, a couple of Sonos speakers for distributed Audio, a projector for backyard nights and A/C automation with Sensibo, through some R260 Remotes and some GlobalCache for ZIR, no T3/T4 just Android desktops and life is so good

One thing that is lovely with HomeKit is auto-switching of homes by location, something I wish C4 would consider, but the use case is very weak I guess!

Putting DIY vs professional HA systems aside, the Geofencing/Occupancy is of great importance and I wish we can advance in this area, I find Apple Geofencing is the closest to practice, not yet that accurate but for a commercial system its acceptable to me, 30m and closer to my house the Garage Door Icon Pops up in my CarPlay system is as cool as hell, not ideal but closer to life, I just hit Open when am < 10m, by the time I'm there the door's open, this wasn't there 2 years ago, I believe huge advancements can be achieved, I wish RoomMe comes up with better hardware or a competing technology emerges!

Since half my house hold is so young they don't have devices I personally don't find geo valuable. Clearly that will change one day and the potential will increase for value to me personally. 

That is cool, I started with HA 7 years ago but get board and decided to go for C4, I still have it running over my Synology NAS. It’s pretty powerful but very DIY and with me coming older, I don’t have the time or capacity to tinker around anymore, I just need something that works and OS3 is just works and my family approved it, my wife never approved HA, so here we are ☺️

Already did, on the page before.  That's the audio distribution interface.  Can play any source (local, streaming) to any endpoint (e.g. sonos, TVs, receiver) or group of endpoints.  Below is a partial view of the main screen.  Among other things, you're seeing a cloud integration with a PurpleAir AQI sensor on my property, as well as a local integration with a weather station on the property.  A bunch of automations tied to those.  You're also seeing presence detection for various family members, easy as pie, and lots of automations around the climate control (also pictured) and the lighting are based on that. If I’m away, the color changes from green to orange and you can click the icon to see my GPS location on a map.  I also gave provided the camera view - it's instantaneous when you click the tab.  Is it reminiscent of early 2000 Windows? I dunno. I know there are more imaginative users than I - some have got their whole house 3d-modeled and the interface revolves around that.  It's you know, up to the user.

Honestly, if I could find a decent replacement for the in-wall touchscreens, we would probably follow this route as well. The only thing keeping us from doing it is the family uses the in-wall touchscreens for intercoms (including from the phone apps). We could probably live without a phone app, but the lack of intercoms would be very noticed.

Happy to speculate, which the OP invited. 
Assumption:  Since it's a popular service, C4 would like to offer this capability. 
Many "less than whole home" integrations offer Apple Music support, including Sonos, Google home, and Alexa
AFAIK, no native Apple Music on C4, Elan, Savant, or Crestron.
Sounds like a strategic decision by Apple re: whole home automation vendors.

The issue is likely Apple.  They don't open their API to many developers.  Sonos is one of the very very few.  Control4 likely just isn't big enough to make the list.

Happy to speculate, which the OP invited. 
Assumption:  Since it's a popular service, C4 would like to offer this capability. 
Many "less than whole home" integrations offer Apple Music support, including Sonos, Google home, and Alexa
AFAIK, no native Apple Music on C4, Elan, Savant, or Crestron.
Sounds like a strategic decision by Apple re: whole home automation vendors.

Luma is junk. Nice for the dealer, because easy for them to support, bad for you.  Almost anything else is better. 

araknis for the routers/ switches is fine.  Would avoid araknis APs. 

A lie that continues to be told by C4 dealers.

I don't see whey they wouldn't, while they figure out what to do with the other data they're collecting from your network.

I block any outbound traffic from the IP cameras so they couldn't phone home if they wanted to.  So far, I haven't seen them try but share the concern based on other articles.

There is little Control4 support for advanced features with IP cams and I would also suggest not running your specific security trigged actions through Control4. Being able to integrate the system is helpful for the Control4 system but it should just be an additional form of communication and control… the security system should be able to run completely independent. 

Count yourself lucky. Almost anything will be better 

Well he has renamed himself “defunct”, so probably figured out he made a misstep. 

I agree that an iPad isn’t ideal, but I don’t think these issues are a big deal. 

Why use a password in this instance?  Apple nags you but you can set it up without a password.  My daughter has a disability and I have no password on her iPad.
And worst case scenario, if you forget the password, couldn’t you just do a factory reset?  If you are only using it for C4 then it isn’t like it is much work to Re-install the C4 app. 

I've always recommended against using iPads for lots of reasons (including the fact that a guest can write the password wrong a few times and you need to bring it to a Apple centre to unlock,which is how 90% of these end up)
But if you have to, ensure you use a mount which makes it easy to remove when required (some wall mounts even use double sided tape)

I see, that makes sense.  

Well he has renamed himself “defunct”, so probably figured out he made a misstep.